Confucius say, Coddling eggs produce inferior chicken
Amritas has a post up today about Japanese-Americans who are clinging like death to their connection to Japan as a way to feel as if their pampered suburban lives are really records of noble struggle.
It seems to be a good week to be aggrieved. One Ryan Joseph Kim has an article on advocate.com about some recent gay and Asian references in pop culture:
A few months ago Details, the metrosexual men
Reminds me of the folks with a Scottish last name who feel they must dress up in kilts and eat haggis and such so they can feel “special.”
When I express annoyance with how obsessed some folks are with their racial heritage, I often ask “Why I can’t get into the act? Can’t I be proud of my racial background?” The answer is usually something along the lines of “You whites haven’t suffered.”
Oh yeah?
My grandfather on my mother’s side started work in the coal mines in Wales at 9 years old, working the pit ponies. His family was poor beyond destitution, living in filthy company shacks and working for an absentee landlord for scrip. “I owe my soul to the company store” Welsh style. He came to Canada penniless at the age of 14 to escape the mines.
My great-grandfather’s family on my father’s side was run off their ancestral land in the Scottish Highland Clearances (as miserable an experience as any American Indian can claim) and came to Tennessee, where they were then run off their land by the TVA…and came to Canada, where my grandmother remembers the first Christmas they got presents. “We each got an orange,” she remembers.
My mother raised me to the age of three in a one-room shack with no running water.
No, us white folk are all just children of privilege who have sauntered through history untouched, sucking our silver spoons.
Right. I doubt I’d be convinced, but I think you could certainly make the argument that being non-white in addition to being a working-class immigrant increases the burdern involved in making your way in America. You could also argue that racism produces a different and maybe worse kind of pressure on you than starting out poor. But you have to argue it, with evidence and reasoning and all that good stuff.